Gustav Husak

Gustav Husak (10 January 1913-18 November 1991) was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 17 April 1969 to 17 December 1987 (succeeding Alexander Dubcek and preceding Milos Jakes) and President of Czechoslovakia from 29 May 1975 to 10 December 1989 (succeeding Ludvik Svoboda and preceding Vaclav Havel).

Biography
Gustav Husak was born in Pozsonyhidegkut, Austria-Hungary (now Dubravka, Slovakia) on 10 January 1913. He joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1932, when he was a law student at the University of Bratislava. He practiced as a lawyer until 1942, when he started to work for the underground party full-time, and became a pivotal figure in the Slovak National Uprising of 1944. He rose quickly in the party ranks, served as Minister of Agriculture from 1948 to 1949, and became a member of the party's Central Committee in 1949. In 1951, he became a victim of Klement Gottwald's Stalinist purges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the heinous crime of "Slovak bourgeois nationalism". He was released in 1960, and rehabilitated in 1963. He worked in the Slovak Academy of Sciences and on various committees, until in 1968 be became Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia. He supported the Warsaw Pact invasion to end the Prague Spring on 20 August 1968, whereupon he became the effective state leader, even though he did not officially replace Alexander Dubcek until 1969. His rule was marked by economic, ideological, and political orthodoxdy, which anaesthetized the vast majority of the population, whose hopes had been so raised by the Prague Spring, into passive submission. Old age did not create a taste for adventurism, and he stubbornly resisted the reformist impulses of Mikhail Gorbachev. This attitude was shared by the party high command, which replaced him as party leader in 1988 with another hardliner, Milos Jakes. In one of the more gratifying ironies of history, he was replaced as President by his complete intellectual and ideological opposite, Vaclav Havel, whom he had tried so hard to silence through incarceration and discrimination.